Alan Johnson is the Editor of Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region and Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). A professor of democratic theory and practice, he is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine, and a Senior Research Associate at The Foreign Policy Centre.

When Islamists scream Jew-hatred in the face of the liberal Left, it hears only 'anti-colonialism'

Above: Saleh chuckles about his class drawing a swastika to upset his Jewish teacher

The extremist Islamist Sheik Raed Saleh has been at it again. Watch this hate-filled rant from the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, broadcast on Al-Jazeera on September 21:

Our souls and our blood we will give to you, oh Prophet of Allah. As for you, you haters, you midgets, you little insolent people … listen to us, so we can show you who you really are. You are slaves to global Zionism.

Astonishingly, when Saleh won his appeal against deportation from the UK earlier this year, many on the liberal-Left celebrated. Jeremy Corbyn MP called a press conference and proclaimed: "He is far from a dangerous man. He is a very honoured citizen, he represents his people extremely well, and his is a voice that must be heard." Corbyn added a personal message: "I look forward to giving you tea on the terrace because you deserve it!"

As CIF Watch noted, the Guardian "produced a plethora of articles, all eerily similar in their support for Salah and his British patrons and in the whitewashing of who Salah is". Sarah Colborne, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) defended Saleh, saying "before coming to Britain, he faced horrific allegations of anti-Semitism, which he completely refuted". Mehdi Hasan, then Political Editor of The New Statesman, prettified Salah as "the Palestinian leader of the largest civil society body in Israel," and argued the hostile media treatment of Salah was an example of the media's “lazy and simplistic coverage (demonisation?) of Muslims.”

All this was astonishing – and for anyone on the democratic Left, deeply depressing, for the evidence about Salah and the Northern Islamic Movement was plain enough.

The Northern Islamic Movement is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and a sister organisation of Hamas. Saleh was imprisoned from 2003-2005 for his role in transferring money to Hamas as well as serving a five-month term in 2010 for assaulting a policeman. And he has a track record of hate speech.

After 9/11, Saleh blamed the Jews. In the Islamic Movement's paper, Saut Al-Haqq Wa-Al-Hurriyya he argued that the attacks had been carried out by "the unique mover' who "wanted to carry out the bombings in Washington and New York in order to provide the Israeli establishment with a way out of its entanglements". He added: "the unique mover found a suitable way to warn the 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center, so that they did not come to work on September 11, 2001".

The next year, Saleh wrote a poem which referred to Jews in these terms. "Oh swindlers / You bacteria of all times / The creator condemned you to be monkey losers / Victory belongs to the Muslims from the Nile to the Euphrates."

In 2007 Saleh gave a speech in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz which peddled the medieval blood libel (the anti-Semitic myth that Jews bake their Matzo bread with the blood of Gentile children):

We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children’s blood. Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread.

Given all this, why did parts of the liberal-Left support Saleh? Mostly, it was case of "my enemy’s enemy is my friend" – a corrosive political logic that has been eating away at the soul of the Left for many decades now.

But it’s more than that. Parts of the liberal-Left have an intellectual blind spot: they can’t see plain the role of religiously motivated anti-Semitism in the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. (I bracket the question of whether their theology is "correct"; I only note the appeal to religious authority and the particular cast it gives to the Jew-hatred.) Paul Berman’s brilliant 2010 book The Flight of the Intellectuals shows that for the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, violence against the Jews in Palestine was not a tactical matter. Armed resistance against "all Zionist colonisers" was "incumbant" on the believer, a sacred duty to be performed, so to speak, with "one’s forehead on the ground".

The last phrase is crucial. It is Said Ramadan’s description of what he learnt from his father Hasan al-Banna (as reported by his son, Tariq Ramadan). As Paul Berman puts it, the Brotherhood understood Zionism as "not a tiny enterprise at all" but rather as "a supernatural enterprise". That is why Saleh rails not against the occupation but the "bacteria of all times". It is why he sees the hand of the demonic "unique mover" behind 9/11. It is why he now thinks the entire West, no less, is a "slave to Global Zionism".

The rot on the Left is so bad that when religiously-motivated anti-Semitism is screamed in its face, it only hears "anti-imperialism" or "civil society activism". Or at least it pretends to.